Posted
by
timothy
on Friday April 11, 2014 @07:19PM
from the random-walk-down-global-politics-street dept.

First time accepted submitter tkalfigo (1448133) writes "The Good Judgment Project is an experiment put together by three well-known psychologists and some people inside the intelligence community. What they aim to prove is that average, ordinary people in large groups and access just to Google search can predict far more accurately events of geopolitical importance than smart intelligence analysts with access to actual classified information. In fact there is a clearly identified top 1 percent of the 3000 predictors group, who have been identified as super-forecasters: people whose predictions are reportedly 30 percent better than intelligence officers."

Except that this has nothing to do with luck. It has to do with independent observers having less pressure on them to, consciously or subconsciously, produce rhetoric ostensibly concerning foreign policy but whose content is determined by domestic political needs.

I think the majority here use Slashdot's default font and never messed with it, but you did mess with yours, making your posts stand out as odd. Blaming everyone else, making them responsible to fix the 'bug' you created on their screen, isn't very helpful. It's a lot easier to just mod you down than to delve into browser font settings and possibly mess up how we view all other websites, just because you like your posts on Slashdot to look like they were typed on an old-timey typewriter. Why don't you just fix your own browser font settings and not put the burden on everyone else?

I'm sorry, but if you are not doing something so that your posts appear in a different font than everyone else, why is your font different than everyone else? Oh, and your signature is in the same font as everyone else's post, not the font which your post is in. So, it seems probable that you have decided to post in a font other than the slashdot default.

It's called optimization. "Unreadable" means that the low-level - indeed, in most people subconscious - routine was unable to comprehend the text, and kicked it up to a higher-level one. The higher level subsystem is more flexible but, as a result, needs more resources which could be put to better use; and of course the process can occur again, escalating text comprehension all the way to the conscious mind. Thus, if you write unreadable - wh

Go tools-options-advanced (by fonts and colors.) Find 'allow sites to choose' and make sure that evil box is NOT checked. Then for each category of font make sure that the one selected is clean and easy to read. If not, change it. Hit ok, done.

Yes, that's what the article says. In a scientific paper that would be in the discussion, possibly in the conclusions. Experienced scientists know that the discussion, and depressingly frequently the conclusions, are BS the authors made up that's not really supported by the data, one way or the other.

Not only that, but people with some distance to the situation and only superficial knowledge are not blinded by facts and details. We have the same phenomenon with predicting sport results. There, people who are not absolute fans or professionals in the sport usually fare better at predicting results as they don't give too much weight on some details, or their own preferences, which in the long run prove to have much less influence than expected. Instead they basicly tend to put teams or athletes they often

By me on the security clearance process reduces cognitive diversity in three letter agencies: http://www.phibetaiota.net/201... [phibetaiota.net] "This essay discusses how the USA's security clearance process (mainly related to ensuring secrecy) may [ironically] have a counter-productive negative effect on the USA's national security by reducing "co

While I am sure there are occasional situations where it might be advantageous to be thought foolish and incompetent, in general this is likely a bad thing.

It's like being thought *weak* in military terms. There in tactical situations you'd like the enemy to underestimate your strength, strategically it's better to be thought stronger than you actually are. If a hostile country is considering violating some treaty they have with us, we'd want them to think our intelligence agencies will catch them red-ha

The problem with Google's prediction algorithm is that it consistently overshoots. The story was on/. about a month ago [slashdot.org], as far as I can tell they're not only not predicting cases correctly, they aren't even attempting to distinguish between strains (how could they, they're predicting from search activity - flu victims rarely know their strain).

I wonder if they properly controlled for luck. Take three thousand people and get them to make predictions and some of them are going to appear unusually accurate than others even if all of them are just making completely random guesses. You'd be surprised how many people don't correctly account for that. Every paper proposing clinical diagnostic criteria I've ever read, for example.

Why do you think it is purely luck? When you have these wild discussion parties - things like "is a bright blob of pixels on a Mars Rover image a cosmic ray, a high-voltage dust-devil, light contamination of a camera box, a gas geyser", you will have an incredible combination of experts - everyone from geologists, ranchers, hill-hikers, photographers, astronomers. Geologists will tell you want can and can't come from the ground, ranchers and hill-hikers will tell you things they have seen and never seen, photographers will tell you what visual artifacts can appear on a camera, and astronomers tell you what can fall from the sky and can't, and what those falling things look like.

It's like solving a giant logic problem where everyone can cross off or tick what what they know. Eventually the set of possible answers reduces down to one or two.

The wisdom of crowds works doesn't have anything to do with having experts. After all, the experts have no way of influencing the crowd. It is a well defined phenomenon that works when people's biases are pretty random, so mistakes cancel each other out. It's a lower quality estimation mechanism than a market, where people that are sure of their answer can be 'louder' than those that don't know said answer, and it lacks the feedback mechanisms of a market, but still, it is helpful to predict things based on widely available information. Ask the crowd information few of them have any idea about, and their result will suck.

So what does the average beating CIA personnel? That the CIA's biases are large enough to need quite a bit of quality control.

Now, having a 1% of the respondents be far better than the CIA experts probably means nothing. If I invite 3000 people over to guess how 10 coin flips will turn out, chances are one or two of them will guess all of them correctly, but that would not make them seers capable of seeing the future. how many people were worse than 30% worse than those same CIA experts?

In statistics it's called an unbiased estimator. Most people know it as an average. It doesn't have any particular link to crowds and the behaviour is very well defined. It does, however, require that the individual estimates be wrong in a random way.

The wisdom of crowds works doesn't have anything to do with having experts.

You are right that the wisdom of crowds does not come from having experts. The wisdom of crowds comes from having a lot of people who all have a little bit of knowledge relevant to the subject. Some of that knowledge might be something that you would not necessarily think was relevant, but when applied as a filter on the other knowledge present produces a result much more accurate than an expert on the subject would ever produce.

The results of this study are not new. Back in the lat 70s, early 80s, there

Posting AC isn't *the* answer, only a part. Here on/. we frequently see ACs post with an appeal to authority, claiming national publication, having designed some new, cool and super-advanced kernel, etc. Those would need to be filtered out as well. I myself have referenced some personal project. Those too. Even the language used would have to be examined to remove certain subtext.

Actually, the key is to eliminate anything which allows me to connect the majority of the comments by one individual as all being by that individual. All of those other things are only relevant if they combine with multiple comments to build a picture of one person who has more wisdom on the subject than everyone else. When I read comments by an Anonymous Coward on slashdot which claims the things which you reference, I always read the rest of their comment more critically. If I find their argument to use s

Because that's not what's going on here. The example in the article is a pharmacist who somehow manages to be better than everyone else at predicting geopolitical events. Not a party with a bunch of experts in various fields hashing things out, just a pharmacist in her kitchen in her spare time.

Flip a coin ten times and there's only a tenth of one percent of a chance of it coming up heads every time. Flip a thousand coins ten times and there's only a small chance one won't come up heads ten times in a ro

Actually, if you read the entire article, it appears that what that pharmacist is doing, inside her own head, is averaging what all of the various sources she reads have to say on any given subject. The mistake would be to say, "Oh, over the last three years, her predictions have been 30% better than the experts. Let's make her one of the experts!" If at some point she were to start to believe that she was an expert at this forecasting, her accuracy would fall off because she would stop adjusting her under

Expert forecasters also average their perceived probabilities from lots of different sources. There's nothing magic about a small town pharmacist doing it. The summary and a lot of Slashdotters seem to like to play up the anti-expert angle, but it's certainly not relevant to my OP, and I doubt the project has produced any evidence for your conclusion.

Except that the "expert" forecasters are influenced by the charisma* of certain individuals to produce the type of results those individuals desire. There have been studies that show that one of the most important aspects of "crowd wisdom" is eliminating the ability of individuals to use their force of personality to influence the decision reached by the crowd.

*I am using "charisma" here to sum up all of the aspects of force of personality and authority over those evaluating the data.

You're still making conclusions that aren't based on the data. There's nothing in their project that identifies why individuals, or the group, might be better than the experts, and my question is about whether the individuals they've identified ARE even better than the experts or if they've simply discovered the right side of a Bell curve (a la Niven).

There have been studies that have shown that crowds, under certain circumstances, can be somewhat resistant to bias. In other circumstances this is obviousl

Maybe you missed the reference.Teela Brown [wikipedia.org] is a character from Larry Niven's Ringworld series.Her defining characteristic is that she's a 6th generation of Birthright Lottery winners and thus, uniquely lucky.

"What is the chance that North Korea will launch a multi-stage missile before June 2015?"
People enter a guessed % of probability. They get 3000 random people to respond. People's guesses are wildly all over the place. However. ..

When you average out all those responses, the resulting number is spooky accurate. So-called, "Wisdom of the crowd."

Luck has both nothing, and everything to do with it.

How can a probability be spooky accurate when it is in reference to a singular event that can't be repeated over and over again?

You should read the article. There's a little section about "wisdom of crowds" and then the balance of it is about particular people they've selected as being super accurate, such as the pharmacist they use as an example. If you take enough people and ask them to guess randomly, some of their guesses will line up very nicely with the answers to any questions. Purely by luck. If you cherry pick these randomly lucky guessers and don't properly allow for your cherry picking in your calculation of expected

But she signed up, got a little training in how to estimate probabilities from the people running the program, and then was given access to a website that listed dozens of carefully worded questions on events of interest to the intelligence community, along with a place for her to enter her numerical estimate of their likelihood.

"Usually I just do a Google search," she said.

In fact, she's so good she's been put on a special team with other superforecasters whose predictions are reportedly 30 percent better than intelligence officers with access to actual classified information.

It's not luck they've selected for, it's the ability to make educated guesses.

That was my thought too. For example, if you grab n people off the street and ask them to make a total guess at 10 coin flips, just by pure chance alone 1.1% of them are going to get 8, 9, or all 10 correct (80% or better "correct" rate). A cumulative binomial distribution of 8 correct of 10 trials with 50% success rate is 98.9%. Likewise the bottom 1.1% will guess correctly 20% or worse. This is the the usual "cause" of some research investigating psychic phenomenon. If the researchers aren't very wel

Back in 2003, there was a similar system called the Policy Analysis Market (PAM) that was close to being implemented. It got deep-sixed by some world-class idiots from Congress (see my opinion [kuro5hin.org] then). It's too bad that we have to go to a somewhat contrived surveying/polling system rather than use something that we know works.

For example, I think a PAM system would have given us (and I mean everyone not just US policy makers) insight into how the events of the Arab Spring revolutions would evolve even if it couldn't have predicted the original flash point.

Funny you should say that, the diplomatic cable leaks showed [wikileaks.org] that high level western diplomats in Syria were concerned about a civil war erupting due to the severe "fertile crescent" drought fuelling internal migration from rural areas to the cities (10% of Syria's total population simply abandoned their farms due to lack of water). The drought caused food prices to rise sharply and food riots became a regular occurrence in cities across the middle east and North Africa.

"flash point" - Have a look at why that protester set fire to himself in the public square and why it resonated so strongly across the Arab world, it wasn't because they all logged on to FB and suddenly realised their governments were tyrannical. Predicting this sort of social unrest is like predicting an earthquake in LA, you can be pretty confident that your prediction will come to pass but have no idea when.

With enough people, there will be someone with insightful information, and probably a balance of opinions. Searching for bugs in open source works a little like that.

But in theory if a professional intelligence service had hard evidence that, for example, a politician is bluffing about something, then a policy can be adopted even if it goes against some conventional wisdom.

For example, the information that Saddam Hussein's WMD programme was a hoax prevented a rash invasion...., um, never mind.

Both the British and Americans used the same government contact for their information, but they didn't tell each other who that contact was. In fact, they had different codenames for the person. When they cross-referenced each others information, they got two confirmations.

If you read, and understood, your link and the article or website, then you would understand I'm not trolling. Of course, they then take their unstructured group and structure it to only contain 'experts'.

I doubt there is any field where one percent of laymen aren't vastly superior to the majority of professionals. The same applies to art, engineering, science, and any other field of study. This is statistically normal.

I doubt there is any field where one percent of laymen aren't vastly superior to the majority of professionals.... This is statistically normal.

Fine, but just like the quatrains of Nostradamus [nostradamu...ctions.org]: can you identify them correctly beforehand? Counting the perfect hits after the fact isn't fair. (But then again I guess it worked for Miss Cleo [weht.net] for a while [consumeraffairs.com])

BTW: 16th century Mr. N. is an idiot. But he's better than the current sales-people paying attention to him with 5 centuries more experience. Oh, and multiple Blood Moons [latimes.com] are soon arriving -- buy your Tarot cards and ticket to safety [imdb.com] now, before it's too late!

That is because elections happen in a way that eliminates the most important aspect of crowd wisdom. In order for crowd wisdom to be reliable it must be insulated from being influenced by the charisma of individuals. There is no way to set up elections to do this. Actually, I wonder if the secret ballot may in a way actually exacerbate this problem.

This thought just came to me now, so I do not think I can explain the reasoning as to why that might be so. I will try any way. It seems possible that the nece

That doesn't make any sense for things where training is needed though. 1% of laymen being better than civil engineers at building extremely large bridges? 1% of laymen being better at fixing cars than a mechanic? How about 1% of laymen being better at basketball than NBA players? It makes absolutely no sense, because we are talking about things where the training time is extremely valuable, and guessing at random will not help you, because there are too many possible answers.

I don't exactly get it. Is it the group as a whole that predicts accurately or its "best predictors"? Because clearly the first hypothesis favors direct democracy as a decision-making process. My intuitive guess is that when you pick a large enough group, some people within that group are clearly going to do better than specialists, because, in a certain way, they are themselves specialists.

This story actually really interested me - On its face, the idea of a website that does these things: Poses user-submitted predictive questions, with user profiles so you can track the most successful predictors, and probably some sort of range voting system for the actual voting process, seems like a really swell idea.

Unfortunately, I've not nearly the technical skills or capability to jump into making a website that aggregates questions, votes, user statistics, graphs, profiles and so on. I went ahead

Ask three thousand people to predict what sequence of heads and tails will come up when you flip a coin 30 times. A few of them will appear to have the ability to predict it correctly, at least in that sample.

The US Government came out with an idea to do this for terrorist attacks after 9/11 where people with knowledge in the areas of the middle east, various groups and other specialties would be invited to a program they could make forecasts. Those that were correct would have money donated to their university or another organization of their choice.
Liberals came out and called it the idea of a bunch of crazies.